Paragraphs.—Of relations between the Idioms of the
Dekhan and those of Proper Hindustan.—Foreign origin
of the Indian Pane.
Late writers have thought that they perceived traces of a
further affinity between the.dialecj^ of the Indian Peninsula
and the "popular idiom of Hindustan ; and it seems now to
be a prevalent opinion, that not only in those portions of
these several languages which are derived from the Sanskrit,
is there, between them an intimate relation, but that
in the other component parts, of each, there is much that
springs from a common original in the Telugu, Kannhdi,
and Tamil, and in the popular dialect of ^Northerp India*
It is probable that an accurate compayisop q f^ h e Hindi
with the Peninsular languages will hereafter throw much
light upon this subject. .
Dr. Stevenson, in a learned Essay on the. Marathi or
Mahratta language, has made some,-remarks which are
sufficient to prove that a certain .degree of agjd ation existe
between the Unsanskrit portion of the Hindi and tho clialeets
of the Dekhan. “ In the Marathi language,’’, he s a ys , the
analysis of twelve pages taken separately throughput, Mqlesr
worth’s dictionary gives about fifty thousand words, of
which about tew thousand may be reckoned primitives and
the rest derived from these. Of the primitives about one-half
are Sanskrit, either entirely or almostin a state of .purity.
And of the „remaining five thousand, two more are still
Sanskrit, though considerably corrupted j one thousand are
Persian and Arabic; and two thousand, or one-fifth of the
the whole, are unconnected with any of those languages, but
belong to what I conceive to have been the language of. the
aborigines of India. Many of the words of this class agree
with the Telugu, Kannadi, and Tamil, and are also to be
traced in the Hindi and Gujarhthi, where there is not the
slightest' connexion with the Sanskrit.” ....
The same writer has given an analysis of fifteen, Marfithi
roots with some of their derivatives, and he has certainly
shewn that several of them, though wanting in Sanskrit,
are common to the Telugu and Kannfidi dialects of the
Dekhan and to the Hindi and Gujarhthi of Northern India.
These are but a very small number of words, but evidence
much stronger is afforded by analogy between these idioms
in grammatical forms. Of this the following instances
are given
The vernacular dialects of India conjugate verbs chiefly
by means of auxiliaries. “ The Hindi and Gujarhthi have,
properly Speaking, no present tense except that of the verb
to be, which, joined to a present participle, serves for the
present in fricative; of all the verbs in tlm language. This Mr.
Campbell asserts to be the' case also with the Telugu, though
by the laws of euphony the fact is somewhat disguised.
Such a present indicative is also in frequent use in Marfithi,
though there is also another. Of all these languages it
may, however, be asserted, that about one-half of the tenses
are made up of partieiples joined to auxiliary verbs. It is
quite the contrary with the Sanskrit, which, like the Greek
and Latin, proceeds on the system of having different terminations
generally for the different tenses.* There must,
thereforej in India, have been some element, like the
Gothic and other Germanic tongues in Europe, to produce
this modification of languages, the greater part of whose
vocables are Sanskrit; hut wlwe will either history or
tradition allow us to look for any such modifying cause,
except in an aboriginal language, following a different
course* in this'respect from the Sanskrit??^ In tie Marfithi,
and in the spokefi languages generally, the second person
present imperative is the root of the verb, as in English
It is observed moreover that “ nouns in the modern languages
of India, instead of the seven or eight eases of the
Sanskrit, have never more than three, or four at the utmost;
* I may#bs,erve that a difference of construction noted in the text, though
striking, is yet not sufficient to prove that two languages do not belong to one
great family. The Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, differ indeed in many verbal
bonstructions; from the Germanietribeof languages, but they all belong to one
great family.. The Welsh has principally the method of constructing the present
tense here described as belonging, to the 'Hindi and Gujarathi, yet is a
sister language with 'the Irish, differently constructed and though more remotely
with the Sanskrit.